The last time we wrote to you from Chile, we were at the beginning of our Design and Demonstration phase (D&D) of our Fisheries Development Model (FDM), visiting fisher's caletas (coves in Spanish) along the Central part of the beautiful Chilean coasts, and, of course, prolonging our romance with the Pacific Ocean and its communities. During these visits, we carried out our form of an interdisciplinary approach to create a framework that could allow for comparison across the multiple, nuanced differences among all these diverse caleta communities and their needs.

We visited a total of 14 caletas. Starting from such a rich canvas the goal was far from easy: to distill numerous qualitative and quantitative variables into a standardized selection criterion to help us identify which of these caletas we could engage with for our future work. What a difficult task! Every caleta has its particularities and intriguing aspects, which means that, in the eyes of a social scientist (i.e. the perspective of this blog post), you want to work with each and every one of them. But we know that is not feasible. Our approach puts an emphasis on prioritizing that the fisher syndicates are enthusiastic about the idea of developing their business and livelihoods by jointly generating ideas for the enhancement of their caletas and fisheries. It is like opening a door, but from the inside. In addition, it would be irresponsible to work with a number of caletas that exceeded our capabilities to create the serene, creative and innovative environment that Future of Fish wants to provide. Difficult as it may be, it was our task and responsibility to select a finite number of caletas, which, after an internal discussion, we decided should be four.

Remember that what we seek is also to generate genuine spaces for co-design (not forced ones, but arising from a conviction of the actors who participate in them), which we aim to reach in a few months of work. These spaces should also include other stakeholders that are not from the world of fisheries and that can problematize any emergent idea by using a different lens. The coordination of stakeholders, and even more in the world of fisheries, sometimes seems like a game of chess.

When establishing criteria for caleta selection, we knew we needed a moderately robust mechanism. In this world of fisheries, where the state of the art in terms of methodologies for selecting caletas for this type of work is nascent, the responsibility for choosing a reliable process skyrockets. True to our own style, we decided, together with our partners in Chile (Centro de Investigación ECOS and Claudio Barrientos), to create our own method. We needed to ensure we had replicable methodology that accommodates all the cultural specificities and histories—a suite of diversity that at first, made the idea of comparing them seem impossible but is required by the unique needs of our FDM model. As we are talking about people and their communities... the exercise of comparing them sometimes seems a counter-intuitive task. Thus, the need to think deeply about where to focus.

It was here that the contribution of our on the ground partners in Chile was like the first rain after the dry season in the African savannah. In early July, we got together with the members of the ECOS team, who have worked in direct relation with artisanal fisheries for the last 20 years, and also with Claudio Barrientos, a consultant who has brought technical experience to groups of small-scale fishermen in southern Chile, to design and run a selection methodology.

First, we established internally at FoF a draft list of important criteria to consider for each caleta, including social and economic aspects, role of women vs men, fishing volumes, leadership, accessibility to the caleta and management of the fishery. Then, we entered everything into a powerful blender (called by human beings an excel spreadsheet ;) ). After a day of confinement and fruitful discussions, and thanks to an innovative methodology proposed for that day by ECOS, 4 people with 4 different backgrounds, originating from 3 different places in the world, weighed every factor, assigning a different score to each. Criteria by criteria, we navigated the waters of normalizing the complex: one of the great challenges in the socio-environmental sciences. The caletas were classified by "risk" of intervention: that is, based on some subjective criteria, each one was placed in a different selection “bucket” (low/med/high) where some of the potential difficulties that could be found in joint work with the caletas was determined. The result was that we were able to successfully categorize the caletas and compare pros and cons of working with each, and in so doing, determine the four we wanted to approach for next-stage engagement: Coquimbo (in the Homonymous region), Papudo and El Quisco (Valparaíso Region) and Duao (Maule region). For our team, the process was a success not only because of how it will help us in the upcoming co-designs, but because we were able as a team (with ECOS and Claudio) to come up with a methodology. It’s an example of successful learning while doing.

Now, we move on to reach out again to the fishers with whom we have been meeting and tell them about our selection results. This will not be easy ... in fact, in our next post, we will share how this isn’t as straightforward as throwing a purse seine into the water and taking tons of fish in a simple automatic haul. When dealing with people, processes are never quite so linear.

This story began in May of 2017 and continued into March and June of this year, where the information could be extracted, sorted out, and the relationships with the people in the caletas was slowly built. In our next edition we will show that things remain complex …. But how could we at FoF live without complexity?